
R*. 










,0 



0^ 



°<. 









^^ *'T.»* A 



A^ <J> C « ■<{, 



A* ... ^^- '" 






^ _ ^, 



The State and the Nation — Sacred to Christian Citizens. 



A SEEMON 



PREACHED IN ALL SOULS' CHURCH, NEW YORK, 






APEIL 21, 1861. 



BY 

HENRY W. BELLOWS. 



NEW YORK: 
JAMES MILLER, 

SUCCESSOR TO 

C. S. FRANCIS & CO., 522 BROADWAY, 
1861. 






SERMON 



" And then shall they see the Son of Man coming in a cloud, 
with power and great glory. 

" And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up 
and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh." Luhe 
xxi. 28. 

There is something profoundly instructive in the 
double title which our Saviour bears in the New Tes- 
tament Scriptures, — Son of Man, and Son of God. In 
Him are united the interests and the affections of heav- 
en and earth. He is equally the representative of God 
and man, the first-born of Deity and the only perfect 
child of Humanity. His double name, too, is expres- 
sive of his double office, which is to bless us in this 
world, while it saves us for another ; to exalt us in time, 
while it prepares us for eternity. Christ, by his life and 
death, his precepts, example, and inspiration, moves 
and fashions alike the institutions of society, and the 
immortal character and destiny of men. In the Church 
he is the Son of God, with tender human sympathy, 
winning men's souls to contemplations, hopes, and as- 
pirations above time and sense ; in the world, he is the 
Son of Man, with divine light and spiritual succor, car- 
rying the principles of a heavenly society into the im- 
mediate civilization of mankind. He is thus the light 
of the world, and the bright and morning-star of im- 
mortality ; the source of progress, improvement, lib- 



erty and happiness here, and of peace and joy and 
sanctity and blessedness hereafter. 

We have a dual nature ourselves, — a double life 
and consciousness corresponding to our Lord's twofold 
ministry ; first, a conscience to be set right towards 
God, a hope full of immortality to be nursed, to which 
the Son of God makes his great appeal ; and then du- 
ties and sympathies towards our fellow-men — offices of 
immediate urgency and opportunity — to which the Son 
of Man lends inspiration and guidance. These two 
sides of our nature are represented in the world by 
the Church and the State, both sacred and divine in- 
stitutions : the Church, the home and guardian of our 
purely spiritual and eternal interests ; the State, the 
home and guardian of our relative, human, and social 
interests. The Son of God is the head of the Church, 
the Son of Man the head of the State ; and Church and 
State are spiritually united in his indivisible character 
and influence. Nothing can be less real than the im- 
aginary separation between Church and State in this 
country. The visible Church is separated from the 
visible State, as to official and legal functions ; but this 
exterior divorce was mainly necessary to secure a truer 
interior union. Civil and spiritual powers, man as a 
citizen and man as an immortal, were never so inti- 
mately blended as in the very origin of our govern- 
ment. Our fathers spurned ecclesiastical control, that 
they might be more free to worship and serve God ; 
and the use they made of the religious liberty they 
acquired, was to render the voluntary support of reli- 
gious institutions and the Church more generous and 
efficacious than any enforced support of it ever had 
been or could be. 

We are not content that Christ as the Son of God 
should rule in the Church alone ; we look for Him as 



the Son of Man to come in the State. We know that 
these interests are one ; that man as a citizen and as a 
saint has the same vocation ; that Christ is Son of Man 
and Son of God; and that He must come equally in 
Church and State before his kingdom is complete. 
When therefore Christ as "the Son of Man" comes in 
power and great glory, he sheds light, inspiration, and 
freshness over society ; he invigorates its. failing pow- 
ers, pours a new life into its dull veins, reorganizes its 
old and effete materials, and changes its fashion into a 
brighter pattern of morality and justice. When Christ 
as " the Son of God " comes, he kindles up the altars, 
revives the devotional life, and quickens the spiritual 
longings and aspirations of his people. And as there 
are periods of Christian revival in the Church, so there 
are periods of Christian revival in the State. They are 
very unlike in their manifestations, though identical in 
their origin, and inseparable in their purpose and ulti- 
mate influence. When the sense of humanity, the 
longing to realize ideal justice, to extend the equality 
of human privileges, to abolish immoral anomalies, to 
embody in more perfect laws more perfectly kept the 
maxims and fundamental doctrines of Christ — when 
philanthropic instincts and aspirations surge in deep, 
full waves through the heart of a nation or an era, then 
the Son of Man is coming, it may be in a cloudy but 
still luith great power and glory. Christ is working on 
the State, the kingdoms of this world are becoming 
the kingdoms of God's Son ; and blessed is the faith 
that recognizes the source of this glorious and power- 
ful advent. For, alas, the jealousy of ecclesiastics or 
Christians of the half-breed, is always misleading those 
who venerate the Son of God, to deny Him as the Son 
of Man. They imagine they do Christ honor, by see- 



6 

ing only half bis work, and recognizing only half his 
presence ! The great human side of his labors, the 
regeneration of social and civil and political life which 
he is steadily producing, they disown as if unworthy 
of, or even inconsistent with, his purely heavenly and 
spiritual redemption ! As if the State were not the 
body of the Church, which ought to be its soul ; its 
purification and strength and growth, as essentially and 
vitally connected with the prosperity and life of the 
Church, as the health of our bodies with the welfare 
of our spirits. This unhappy alienation of Church and 
State, of social and religious interests, has usually left 
the movements of liberty and progress, and the read- 
justment of society to better social and civil standards, 
in the hands of the undevout and the unbelieving; as 
if it v> ere too much to love God and liberty at the 
same time, or humanity and heaven together ; as if 
philanthropy were the rival instead of the partner of 
piety, and the State the antagonist, instead of the ally 
of the Church. Are we never to learn that Christ is 
equally Son of Man and Son of God, and that he is as 
jealous of one name as of the other ? Is the humanity 
of our Lord less precious and significant than his di- 
vinity ? Nay, is life itself not the beginning of im- 
mortality ; this world the predestined scene of Christ's 
first triumph ; and our ordinary, social, civil, and do- 
mestic life the very sphere where his glorious kingdom 
is to be set up? 

I speak of our secular, as distinguished from our 
future interests, as all comprehended under that one 
word, the State. That is the only grand, venerable, 
symbolic word that can fitly represent them all. The 
State — the great common life of a nation, organized 
in laws, customs, institutions ; its total social being in- 
carnate in a political unit, having common organs and 



functions; a living body, witli ahead and a heart, com- 
mon pulsations, common interests and feelings, with 
a common consciousness. The State ! wound it in any 
part, and pain is felt in all. Warm it any where, and 
its whole blood is cheered. Feed it at its head, and 
its whole body is nourished. The State — it is no ab- 
straction ! but a living, breathing reality, with a mem- 
ory, a consciousness, a sensibility to praise and blame, 
a conscience, a power to sicken and die, or to conva- 
lesce, and grow, and thrive. When Louis XIV. said, 
" The State — it is I," — if he meant that the State had 
a personality like his own, he spoke a great and most 
pregnant truth. For until we learn to affirm con- 
science, intellect, obligation, shame, honor, unity of the 
State as of an individual, we are in a grovelling me- 
chanical humor, which tends all the time to carry us 
back to the barbarous or savage condition. That old 
"divinity that doth hedge a king" was the mere re- 
flection of the sanctity that belongs to the State, and 
only as its great representative was the veneration paid 
to royalty, most fitly due. The State is indeed divine, 
as being the great incarnation of a nation's rights, priv- 
ileges, honor and life ; that to which every man dying, 
bequeaths all that he cannot carry with him — the State 
being the heir of all the precious memories of succes- 
sive generations, fed on their nobility, strong with their 
good services, rich with their wealth, impregnated with 
their spirit, and perpetuating in itself the glorious tradi- 
tions of all its successive generations of faithful children. 
Essential to the life and glory of the State, is the 
sentiment of nationality. The progress of the world 
has laid in the development of this self-consciousness in 
peoples. And as great States have become more and 
more humane. Christian, free ; as their national spirit 
and temper, their constitutions and laws have partaken 



more and more of what we love and admire in great 
Christian characters, — the Son of Man has come in 
them, with great power and glory. In the old world, 
however, nationality — always and under all circum- 
stances beautiful and glorious — -has been more or less - 
in rivalry with civil liberty. Governments, which prop- 
erly represent and externalize the national life and 
spirit, have yet been commonly made strong at the ex- 
pense of the rights and independence of the people. For, 
by a noble instinct, people will consent to a great loss 
of personal liberty, for the sake of national dignity and 
power. They gladly merge their private rights and 
privileges in the majesty of the State, and the loyalty 
found under despotic governments, which are yet true 
to themselves, is an affecting tribute to the love and 
pride of country Avhich sweetens even the wrongs and 
sufferings of the over-governed and over-taxed. That 
a proud loyalty should belong to England, where such 
a steady advance in popular rights is always making, 
does not surprise us. But it is equally true of France, 
which perhaps even more than England beats with a 
national pulse and pride, although her government is 
a usurpation and her emperor a despot. But he has 
the skill to make France great, feared, loved, — he is 
true to her national instincts and aspirations, and her 
people postpone their private rights and longings, to 
the glory of France. But how sublimely is nationality 
exhibiting itself in Italy and in Russia — in Italy, where 
a common language and blood, common hopes and 
fears and interests, are forcing one circulation through 
all its lately manacled and paralytic limbs ; and a cen- 
tral heart, true to generous ideas and human rights, now 
sends for the first time for fifteen hundred years, lawful 
pulsations from the Alps to the Ionian Sea. The icy 
Nortli is not behind the fervid South in national aspi- 



ration. Russia has just achieved undying glory, by 
an act surpassing even British emancipation in courage 
and fidelity to conscience. Her splendid enfranchise- 
ment of the serfs is perhaps the greatest tribute ever 
paid by a nation to moral convictions; and the "Son 
of Man came in great power and glory," when that 
lately-esteemed barbarous people, in the person of her 
czar, her princes and nobles, laid down the intoxicat- 
ing but corrupting and damning pride of man-owning^ 
at the feet of a Christian throne. The glorious author- 
ity of the State, the worth and dignity of a national 
character, the possibility of eradicating a moral cancer 
from the breast of a nation — however near its life — 
these ideas have been gloriously vindicated for modern 
times — and for us, especially — in Italy and in Russia, 
the extremes of Europe. 

We have a different equation to solve here, and 
one on which the attention of the whole world waits 
with anxiety. 

No people can be great, respected, loved, feared, 
trusted, without nationality ; without patriotic devo- 
tion and unity, national instincts, and affections; a 
common government round which they rally, and a 
common soil, every inch of which is sacred to every 
citizen. We have in several respects the grandest ele- 
ments of unity ever possessed by any people ; a com- 
mon language and a common religion ; a territory in- 
divisible in natural boundaries; a continent with all 
the isolation of an island, and with the disadvantageous 
vastness of its space overcome by the genius of mod- 
ern locomotive arts. We have the solemn memory of 
common wars in which one people shed their mingled 
blood now on Northern and now on Southern soil. Our 
great names belong to the whole country. There is 
every reason in the world — one only excepted — why 



10 

our American people should be a unit ; and tlie trial 
now upon us, is whether that one reason shall prevail 
against all the others. 

American nationality has doubtless some obstacles 
in its way altogether peculiar in the history of civiliza- 
tion. It is an attempt to organize the jealous individ- 
ualism of democratic freedom — a condition in which 
personal independence and the private man and local 
authority claim, and are allowed, the largest liberty — 
into a consentaneous, harmonious, and powerful nation, 
able to wield its authority, to symbolize its majesty, to 
unify its policy through a strong government, — and 
yet one strong only in the confidence and affectious of 
the people. You cannot have a great nationality, with- 
out a strong government. There must be a proper 
expression and symbolism of the national life in an in- 
violable national flag, and in trusted and sustained na- 
tional rulers. But you cannot have a strong govern- 
ment in our circumstances of democratic liberty with- 
out the free and full consent of the mass of the people. 
Can you have that consent in this country ? No ! says 
the whole European world. No ! says the history of 
the past. No ! says the Southern Confederacy. No ! 
say the governors of the Border States. No ! said a 
week ago some of the leading presses of the North. 
No! said the fears and misgivings of patriotic souls 
everywhere. But, thanks be to God, the instincts and 
affections of the American heart, the latent nationality 
of the vast majority of its people, have rushed as with 
the might of a deluge, to drown those fearful Nays, in 
one sublime affirmation ! Yea ! yea ! say the people, 
we are a nation. We have a common heart and soul, 
and are one body. The government (we care not what 
party has put it there) stands for this nationality — stands 
for our honor, power, unity, self-respect — stands for 



11 

our dignity abroad and our peace and prosperity at 
home — stands for America ! The American flag has 
our hearts' blood in its ruddy veins ; our national heav 
en opens in its field of blue ; and our lives shall set 
sooner than its stars ! And clustering round its stand- 
ard, flock at once a hundred thousand men — the flower 
of the land — to maintain in the face of all the world the 
proud assertion : This American people is not a set of 
civilized squatters upon a common territory — a school 
of wriggling fish accidentally caught in one federal 
net — an aggregation of petty communities, confined in 
some political kaleidoscope, to which any strong hand 
at every election may give a shake that alters its whole 
aspect and identity ; but instead of all this, it is a Na- 
tion^ like England, France, Russia, with an organic life 
and destiny — a pride, a character, a soul, which it will 
vindicate and uphold so long as it has an ounce of sil- 
ver in its treasury, or a drop of blood in its veins. 

We have long known that our nationality was pro- 
nounced enough to make us safe against all foreign 
foes. Our doubts have been whether our centrifugal 
forces at home might not prevail over our centripetal ; 
our local interests and passions over our national pride 
and unity. And certainly, for twenty years, the omens 
have been dark and discouraging. Our patriotism has 
been all exhausted in efforts to hang together upon 
eternal compromises and ever-shifting conditions. Our 
statesmanship has been a perpetual feat of balancing 
upon the ever-tightening rope of sectional jealousy and 
exaction. The equiUbrmm, not the nationality, has 
been our worship ! The States have been stealing away 
the loyalty due to the nation. Parties have absorbed 
the pride belonging to the country. National men 
have been shrinking into petty politicians, and bribery^ 



12 

corruption, peculation, treason have flourished in the 
capital. 

/ did not know — you did not know — the cabinet 
did not know, a single week ago, whether the country 
had a heart and soul or not. A horrid nightmare of 
apathy, hesitation, doubt, sat upon the nation's breast, 
and it looked as if the country might die in this ster- 
torous sleep. But the cracking of that splintered flag- 
staff broke the spell. The nation woke on Monday 
morning and shook itself, and brushed away the doubts 
and difiiculties and dissensions which had paralyzed it, 
as a man clears the sleep from his eyes with the first 
handful of water he snatches when he wakes ; and now 
there is no more doubt that we are a nation and a gov- 
ernment, to be respected at home and abroad, than 
there is that shameful treason and folly have disgraced 
a powerful section of the country, and are aiming 
straight at the national heart. 

American nationality is not on trial, — for we may 
consider it established by the wonderful demonstrations 
of the past week. But it is important to understand that 
the contest before us is one in which some long-rooted 
and deeply-bedded errors fatal to our peace, our na- 
tional morals, our religion and our power and pros- 
perity, are to be exterminated — it may be with bloody 
hands. 

It is no longer to be said with bated breath only. 
Freedom is national. Slavery is sectional ; that is to be 
thundered with constitutional cannon upon the deaf 
and deluded ears of those who have refused to listen 
to the ballot-box. It is no longer to be allowed that 
secession is, perhaps, the right of disaffected States. 
That word is to be blotted from our political vocabu- 
lary with national scorn; and blacker lines drawn 
about it than ever fenced in the iniquitous entry of 



13 

some subservient legislature, from polluting the records 
of the State. It is no longer to be admitted that we have 
a divided sovereignty to distract and neutralize the loy- 
alty of our army and navy and people. There is no more 
pestilent heresy in the world than that of a double sov- 
ereignty. God and mammon, Christ and Belial, may as 
soon live together as two sovereignties! And our de- 
luded brethren are themselves logically proving this, 
by giving their sole allegiance to the only sovereign 
they reverence, their separate States. This wretched 
fallacy lies at the root of our troubles. We have 
evaded it, covered it over, coaxed it, temporized with 
it — but now we have to exterminate it. The supreme, 
sole undivided sovereignty of the United States is to 
be finally vindicated, and the nation is not to lay down 
its arms while a single traitor to the flag remains to be 
dealt with. It is unfortunate that our local govern- 
ments are called States. It misleads the people by 
clothing these admirable organizations with a delusive 
seeming of sovereignty ; but this narrow, selfish, ig- 
norant provincial pride must be permanently humbled, 
and the wide and noble American patriotism of the 
Fathers brought back to its original place and dignity. 
Nor is it any longer to be admitted, that a consti- 
tutional majority holds its right to rule by sufferance 
and dispute. This rebellion is a rebellion against the 
Ballot-box, the most sacred possession of modern civil- 
ization. The ballot-box is more vital to our interests 
as Americans, than mints and forts and bank-vaults and 
treasuries and armories. We may more innocently 
and safely submit to assaults on these, than upon that 
symbol and instrument of our peaceful liberties. Al- 
low uncertainty, dispute, contempt, armed opposition 
to hang over its decisions, and our country is lost ! 
No ! the ballot-box must be now forever lifted above 



14 

the desecration of sectional or party rage and oppo- 
sition. Its peaceful rights must be sustained with all 
the force that its loyal supporters can command. A 
million cartridge-boxes must see that the ballot-box at 
the end of this struggle is henceforth safe without one 
musket to protect it. 

We have, then, a holy war on our hands — a war in 
defence of the fundamental principles of this govern- 
ment — a war in defence of American Nationality, the 
Constitution, the Union, the rights of legal majorities, 
the ballot-box, the law. We must wage it in the name 
of civilization, morality, and religion, with unflinching 
earnestness, energy, and self-sacrifice. God knows how 
we have striven and prayed to avert the awful neces- 
sity ! But the hour would not be delayed. And no 
sublimer spectacle has dawned on the world than the 
sudden dispersion of all partisan feelings, commercial 
selfishness, and weak irresolution, by the solemn up- 
rising of the ancient spirit of liberty. It has come 
unexpectedly, but not a minute too soon to save the 
nation. Another presidential term, under the auspices 
of the spirit which has prevailed for five and twenty 
years past, would have put the nation, bound hand and 
foot, in the toils of a corrupted, insolent, and domi- 
neering Slaveocracy. But the nation is aroused ! and 
it must be kept awake. Our present dangers are the 
penalties of past stupor. This noble patriotism which 
now dignifies all hearts, must not be suffered to escape 
in a temporary ebullition. It must be calmed on the 
surface and deepened at the bottom. It must learn 
patience, persistence, and gravity. We are providen- 
tially called to a conflict more urgent than our first revo- 
lution — more perilous and awful. We must not de- 
spise our enemies, nor think slightingly of their saga- 
city, their means, or their resolution. They are terribly 



15 

in earnest, they are riclier than we think, they have 
long-arranged plans, they have a desperate game to 
play, they have able, ambitious, and unscrupulous 
leaders, and are under the sway of local delusions, politi- 
cal fallacies, and military habits and tastes. It is only 
by the instant rally of the largest force we can muster, 
and by the immediate exercise of the greatest power 
we can put forth, by the dropping of every hesitating 
or half-way policy, by the most direct, aggressive, and 
overwhelming vindication of all our laws and rights, 
that we can diminish the effusion of blood, and control 
within the narrowest limits the horrors and the injuries 
of Civil War. 

This is not a war against the South, or against its 
institutions, its rights, or its people. It is a war for 
the South, for the whole people, for the Constitution, 
and the Union. We see our brethren there under a 
general madness, ready to fire the Capitol, drawing the 
sword upon their own and our own country. We see 
them ready to commit national suicide, and we rush 
in to prevent a catastrophe as fatal to them as to us ! 
"We must be cruel, that we may be kind." We must 
be their enemies for the moment, because we wish to 
be their permanent friends ; and God knows that their 
distant posterity will bless us for restraining the mad- 
ness which, if allowed to have its way, would bury 
the American name, and its liberties and glories, in an 
ignominious oblivion. 

March on, then, ye noble patriots from the loyal 
States of our sacred Union ! Your faces are set to- 
wards the grave of Washington, which must never pass 
into any keeping less dignified than the nation's own. 
You go to save the Capitol, where the Father of his 
Country, and Jefferson and the Adamses and Madison 
and Jackson presided over a common soil with impar- 



16 

tial care ; where Marshall and Jay and Story judged 
the people righteously ; where Gadsden, Pinckney and 
Livingston, Hamilton and King, and Clay and Web- 
ster honored the Union with their fervid devotion ; 
and where patriotism and wisdom and justice still sur- 
vive, and seek, with honest impartiality, to maintain 
and allow the rights and claims of the thirty-four States 
of the nation. What though your blood has already, 
on the sacred 19th of April, rebaptized our liberties 
on the soil of Maryland ? The men of '61 are not more 
precious nor less brave than those of '76, and Baltimore 
is as good a place as Lexington to die for one's coun- 
try ! Go, then ! ye noble sons of Massachusetts and 
New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio, Rhode Island and 
young Minnesota ! offer your bodies as the first ram- 
part to our invaders. The ranks will rapidly close up 
behind you — for this is no time for men to hold their 
lives dear ; no day for cowards, sluggards, or neutrals. 
The Son of Man bids you "look up and lift up your 
heads, for your redemption draweth nigh." Your 
country, mankind, history, and God's holy bar, will 
bless you for your alacrity, your courage, your fidel- 
ity, and your sacrifices. 



W60 








■<^ 



^^°^ 















/% 









O N O ' -^ 



















Or o « " ' •» ^ A 







^ ,-"^ 

















4 O 



*- 



o V 

/ 1 

^^ . * • o . 



^"X °^W.' /% IW- /\ '"■ •^*'"** • 






.S*^r 







*.,.• ^t 






r% 









'bV" 




















V . < • 



